Hearts and Hooves and Georg’s Self-Promotion · 3:20am Feb 15th, 2019
In honor of this day, I got the wife a small box of chocolates, I’m getting you some shameless self-promoting story plugs, and I got myself some needed time working on cleaning up my older stories. Oh, and Iisaw put together a cover for my Bronycon Bookstore double-story entry, which I’m listing next:
The One Who Got Away
— When Gaberdine is awarded a noble title by Princess Celestia, he soon finds out that his new lands contain several surprises. For starters, there is no land in his new barony. Secondly, his new castle turns out to be a broken-down riverboat. And third is… seaponies.
Baron Gaberdine has a lot to learn about his new barony. And himself.
Fortunately, he has a very young teacher.
Drifting Down the Lazy River
— A frustrated young orphan colt with a talent for painting is determined to run away from his dead-end rural village for the distant cultural haven of Baltimare. All he needs to do is slip aboard a raft and drift down the river Fen until he reaches his destination. It’s a simple plan, and would have worked just fine except for one thing.
Seaponies.
And the original that started it all, the Traveling Tutor series, from meeting to romance to childbirth.
The Traveling Tutor and the Librarian
The Traveling Tutor and the Diplomat’s Daughter
The Traveling Tutor and the Royal Exam
Twilight Sparkle was quite positive she could handle the job of teaching young unicorn students in Ponyville how to handle their new magic, but when the school’s traveling magic teacher returns to town as scheduled, a series of miscommunications and accidents nearly drive the two of them crazy. Only the power of friendship (and a certain amount of tinkering from the townsponies) can save the day for them and their students before complete disaster strikes, but over the course of three stories, we find there is a lot more than friendship in store for the two young teachers.
A sneak peek at the upcoming paper copy of The One Who Got Away/Drifting Down the Lazy River, courtesy of Iisaw.
FYI: I'm reworking the entire Traveling Tutor trilogy to bring the footnotes into a standard format, clean up the way it looks, and such. *IF* things work right, I might have a paper copy ready by Bronycon.
Is there a standard format for such things? I tuned out during IT classes about Microsoft Office formattings, since I believe in free and open formats. Nasty shock when I started interning and jerks on the phone were actually asking questions about MS Office and not interesting stuff like rebuilding a corrupt boot partition or converting to XFS.
https://xkcd.com/743/
Should that The Traveling Tutor and the Diplomat’s Daughter be The Traveling Tutor and the Royal Exam?
5013666 Had the link right and the label rong. Nice catch. Thanks.
5013664 Footnotes? I'm of the 'Whatever works' camp. I used to put them at the end of chapters, but that was terrible for story flow. Inline seems to work better. Here, let me paste in one or two.
“Just ink.” Green Grass sighed and looked out his window at the distant stars. “I thought we both agreed that sleeping together was a bad idea?”
“You made a Pinkie Promise to come back to bed.” Twilight’s eyes⁽³⁾ glittered in the darkness as she looked up at him.
(3) Purple, thankfully. For a moment, Green Grass feared they might be Princess Luna Turquoise in color.
—
“Yes, but that was your bed.”
“I hereby declare this to be my bed. Are you staying in here, or going to sleep in your bed in the library? Gotta warn you, it’s locked.” She grinned mischievously before nuzzling back into his warm neck.
A faint noise of paper rustled through the interior of the wagon, a repetitive pattern that slowly worked its way through Green Grass’ mental morning fog. There was a rustle. Then a pause, as if somepony were reading what had been revealed when a page flipped over. Then another rustle, and the pattern repeated.
Green Grass managed to open one eye, taking in the angle of the bright sunshine coming through his window, the light noise of pages being flipped and the warm body draped along his back before coming to the conclusion that Twilight had not returned to her library over the night. To be honest, early morning was not where Green Grass shone intellectually, as his college⁽*⁾ records would testify.
(*) And a four page statistical summary by Twilight Velvet presently sitting inside the Ponyville Library.
—
“Good morning, sleepyhead.” Twilight’s soft voice raised the mane on the back of his neck, most probably because she leaned down to nuzzle him right behind the ears before she spoke. A series of goosepimples traveled down his spine, along with an uncontrolled twitch or two that made her giggle. “Did you have anything scheduled this morning?”
....
Twilight glanced over the top of her menu at Rarity’s smirk before giving a sigh. “All right, I’ll ask again. Are you going to return that overdue book?”
“Moi?” The fashionista tittered⁽⁴⁾ discreetly. “Are you going to tell me all about sleeping with your handsome coltfriend? Details, darling. All the little details.”
(4) Giggle of Girlish Glee Concealing a Secret.
—
“He’s not my coltfriend. We are just working on his thesis, that’s all.” Twilight gave a sigh of frustration and closed her menu with a snap. “And why won’t you let me pay for lunch?”
Rarity waved one hoof limply. “Darling, your nice coltfriend’s fiancée paid me enough for that rag I was throwing away to buy you lunch for simply weeks, so don’t worry about it. Now, about your sleeping with that nice young stallion.”
“What makes you think I’m sleeping with him?”
Rarity nearly exploded from pent-up laughter. “Because, darling. If you weren’t sleeping with him, you would have found my overdue library book by now. I stuck it under your pillow over a week ago.”
I would love to have a copy of 'The one who got away' on my bookshelf, but will not be able to attend Bronycon. Would you consider allowing me to buy a copy and ship it to the Netherlands, should you have any left after the Bronycon Bookstore closes?
Rumour has it that Knighty is working on a specific bbcode for footnotes. I've no idea what form it'll take, though.
You're evil, now I have to read those *again*.
I am loving that book cover.
I may need to go read those wonderful stories again
to steal good ideas fromto be educated on what good writing really is. :)I love the cover, but I've always preferred the cover art for The One Who Got Away. Would I be asking for too much if the cover art for it somehow worked its way into the final thing?
If not, I'm still buying it regardless.
5013934 Hm. Wonder if I can pull off a full-page edge to edge black and white next to the title page. I'll have to play with it.
5013700
No problem; you're welcome. :)
5013787 He's got a good start here, but I thought I'd better just do them manually since they have to go from here to a HTML file to a Word file to a PDF to get to Lulu for the Bronycon printing. (if I can manage it)
Will you have physical copies of these stories available to purchase online for those of us who aren’t planning on going to BronyCon?
5015815 No, I'm going to be mean and cruel and... Yes, of course. Silly.
The objective is not to go to Bronycon with fifty books and sell ten, or go with ten books and have fifty people ask to buy one, so I'll probably get everything set up to order and run a blog post that roughly will go "Hey, how many of you want this one? It's going to run $X." (Plus email everybody who previously told me they were interested. (marks your name down)) Then I can run off that many books plus ten or twenty, because the *absolute* worst thing that happens in that case is I have leftovers to give away as Christmas presents to relatives. And that goes double for The Lazy Dragon of Dragonvale, because that's going to be a Draw Your Own Dragons Inside book, and I've got lots of young relatives with pencils and crayons.
"Hey, a book from Uncle Lynn. About... ponies?"